Latino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla

Footnotes of Social Justice

Footnotes of Social Justice Elena Padilla and Chicago Puerto Rican Communities Mérida M. Rúa Trained by a historian, in an interdisciplinary doctoral program, I was accustomed to hearing “sometimes the story is in the footnotes.” Although reading footnotes was nothing new, I had never been fascinated by footnotes until I read and reread Elena Padilla’s 1947 University of Chicago master’s thesis, “Puerto Rican Immigrants in New York and Chicago: A Study in Comparative Assimilation.”1 Scattered at the bottom of the pages in three separate chapters, these notes grabbed my attention: —The data collected among the recent Puerto Rican migrants in Chicago were obtained in collaboration with Miss Muna Muñoz-Lee. —Personal communication with Jesús Colón, President of the Spanish section of the International Workers Union, March 1945. —Héctor Alvarez Silva, et al., “Preliminary Report on the Puerto Rican Contract Workers in the Chicago Area,” November 25, 1946 (Mimeographed).2 I decided to look for the story in the footnotes. It is likely most readers of the thesis would assume the names or works cited are footnoted because they hold some significance; they must mean something, or else why place them in the margins? In Padilla’s thesis, indeed, her footnotes form a semi-public transcript, marginal notes worthy of consideration by all readers concerning academic literature, archival collections, or expanded thoughts on theoretical frameworks while also prompting other meanings and critical linkages for readers with degrees of proficiency in Puerto Rican and Caribbean history and culture. Fine-tuning James Scott’s formulation of the offstage articulations of public dissent,historian Earl Lewis suggests that between the offstage or hidden transcript and the public one, the semi-public transcript is potentially available, identified as the poem, song, or folktale, among other forms. He writes, “This coded message is audible but indecipherable to those outside the community of reference because most outsiders do not understand the importance of certain symbols, cues, and events.”The ability to read and comprehend these cues, Lewis acknowledges, is acquired knowledge; one is socialized through cultural practices.3 It is in Padilla’s marginal notes, that is, her semi-public transcript, where we can detect what anthropologist Virginia Dominguez calls a “politics of love and rescue,”or the discrete ways in which researchers have shown that they truly care for and about the people they study.The partial descriptions of relationships and deeds found in the footnotes of Padilla’s work serve to frame and politicize the stakes of the research and thus are a strategic location from which she makes her extra-anthropological interventions: the use of her academic skills and credentials combined with her political commitments to improve the daily lives and employment conditions of Puerto Rican contract workers in Chicago.4 Taken together these footnotes provide a unique window not only into some of Padilla’s intellectual influences and interlocutors but also into her early scholarly and personal commitments to social justice.As the first footnote reveals, Padilla collaborated politically and intellectually with Muna Muñoz Lee, her classmate and roommate at the University of Chicago. Muñoz Lee was the daughter of the president of the Puerto Rican Senate, Luis Muñoz Marín, who in 1948 became Puerto Rico’s first popularly elected governor.At the University of Chicago, Padilla and Muñoz Lee studied under anthropologists Sol Tax and Robert Redfield, while Padilla also worked with sociologist Louis Wirth. Along with the Chicago social science luminaries, Padilla consulted periodically with New York Puerto Rican labor activist Jesús Colón, as indicated in the second footnote. She made use of his extensive personal archive—which included community publications such as local newspapers, organization manifestos, and reports—as well as the political knowledge he gained in years of in grassroots organizing.5 Padilla even called on Colón personally to assist dissatisfied Puerto Rican contract workers from Chicago who decided to leave for New York City. Clearly, Padilla relied on and highly respected Muñoz Lee’s and Colón’s perspectives in her deliberations of her scholarly activism. The third footnote suggests that the unjust treatment of workers kindled her interest in researching the footnotes of social justice 129 experiences of Puerto Rican migrants in Chicago; nevertheless, it was an issue in which she took more than academic interest. One of seven co-authors, listed in alphabetical order, Padilla was...